Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Shooting at Easy Targets

Professor Stephanie Mulder, an archaeologist who evidently excavated in Syria as a guest of the Assads, points her finger at those she considers to be easy targets behind the ongoing tragedy in Syria.

But one should be skeptical of blame heaped on Western collectors by those with an ax to grind against private collecting.  And no one in the mainstream media has yet asked the the question if the archaeological community's unqualified support for dictatorship's absolute control of the past has made antiquities the target of the disaffected.

Addendum:  A CPO reader pointed out that the Jewish artifact mentioned in the article has a provenance dated back to 1913!  If anything, this shows that "Syrian artifacts" have been collected for a long time and it's wrong factually (and ethically CPO would argue) for them to be characterized as a class as "blood antiquities."   

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